Live data from Hacker News

​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

zdnet.com

31–40 of 61 posts

Re: ​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

#31

Serious question: What are the advantages of Ubuntu on a server over, say, Debian?

Ubuntu has more frequent releases, but since people are using Ubuntu LTS that's a very good question considering Debian also has LTS releases on the same frequency.

Ubuntu constantly backports certain applications like Firefox for LTS so you don't have a two year old browser. Does Debian LTS provide that?

Edit: Oh, server. Forgot that context.

Re: ​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

#32
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu has more frequent releases, but since people are using Ubuntu LTS that's a very good question considering Debian also has LTS releases on the same frequency.

Ubuntu constantly backports certain applications like Firefox for LTS so you don't have a two year old browser. Does Debian LTS provide that? Edit: Oh, server. Forgot that context.

Firefox on a server?

Re: ​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

#33
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu has more frequent releases, but since people are using Ubuntu LTS that's a very good question considering Debian also has LTS releases on the same frequency.

Ubuntu constantly backports certain applications like Firefox for LTS so you don't have a two year old browser. Does Debian LTS provide that? Edit: Oh, server. Forgot that context.

Probably not but is that relevant for Ubuntu Server?

Re: ​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

#34
post #2

I have to agree with him on Unity, the reaction to it seemed to outweigh it’s presentation. I gave it a try and liked some aspects but ultimately ended up on Cinnamon. I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it.

I don't think that in the Linux world people use something they don't like, unless there are no alternatives. In my case I don't like to have a top bar and that's one of the reasons I never considered buying a Mac since the 80s (the global menu is another one). So I kept using Gnome which let me move everything to a bottom bar (Gnome Fallback with GTK3). Gnome Shell seems to be able to do it too now and I'll give it another try when I'll upgrade to 18.04.

So yes, I never used Unity but I didn't ask for its demise. There were alternatives and I was happy with them. Still Canonical decided to dump Unity. Why? They couldn't make money out of it, and out of Mir and the old Convergence project. [1]

In his words

> Some of the things that we were doing were clearly never going to be commercially sustainable, other things clearly will be commercially sustainable, or already are commercially sustainable.

> The decision] meant that we couldn’t have on our books (effectively) very substantial projects which clearly have no commercial angle to them at all.

That's not because people were asking Canonical to kill Unity.

[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unit...

Re: ​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

#35
post #8
post #2

I have to agree with him on Unity, the reaction to it seemed to outweigh it’s presentation. I gave it a try and liked some aspects but ultimately ended up on Cinnamon. I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it.

I actually stopped using linux as my main OS in 2010 because of Gnome3 and Unity. The "Applications","Places","System" menu was clear, intuitive and desktop oriented. I never liked KDE, and MATE seemed like a rather unoptmized fork. So it left me with using Xubuntu VM on a Windows host (and I hate Windows because of it lacks bash). Once I moved to the US I started using Mac and never looked back. The best thing that…

There was, and there is, Gnome Flashback which is basically a Gnome 2 desktop with GTK 3. The Compiz cube still works.

Re: ​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

#36

Serious question: What are the advantages of Ubuntu on a server over, say, Debian?

In my experience Debian has considerably older packages. However if one installs everything with docker the underlying OS has very little importance. It stops at sshd, systemd and vim, anything else can be dockerized.

Re: ​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

#37
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu has more frequent releases, but since people are using Ubuntu LTS that's a very good question considering Debian also has LTS releases on the same frequency.

Ubuntu constantly backports certain applications like Firefox for LTS so you don't have a two year old browser. Does Debian LTS provide that? Edit: Oh, server. Forgot that context.

https://packages.debian.org/en/wheezy/firefox-esr

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

Re: ​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

#38

I think the major distros defaulting to GNOME is not going to end well. I tried very hard to use (and like) GNOME Shell for a while, and put it on my wife's computer as well. I always ended up finding completely wrong for the way I want to interact with my computer. And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's…

I'm a GNOME loyalist, but if I was going to set up a system for a non-technical user today, I would go for MATE and set the theme that emulates the OS that they used before, or to suit their preferences. MATE has really impressed me with the last couple of releases.

Re: ​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

#39
post #36

Serious question: What are the advantages of Ubuntu on a server over, say, Debian?

In my experience Debian has considerably older packages. However if one installs everything with docker the underlying OS has very little importance. It stops at sshd, systemd and vim, anything else can be dockerized.

A lot of people run Ubuntu inside the container. There are many libraries today that officially only support some Ubuntu LTS (Tensorflow, for example).

Re: ​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it. Agreed. I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Unity was ahead of it’s time, and a lot of people just didn’t have the hardware to handle it with zero lag.

The last thing a DE should do is consume so many resources nothing else can run properly. There is no benefit to it. DE's should use almost nothing and run lag-free on 10 year old hardware. Show me a single feature in Unity that saved so many people, so much work that it justified extra power consumption across the world. Hell, show me a single feature that didn't actually slow people down compared to, let's say, xfc…

1. Global Menus — by being at the edge of the screen, their "height" effectively became infinite (for the purposes of Fitts's law), so you could very easily and quickly move your mouse to them. However, if they annoyed you, you could turn on Locally-Integrated Menus (at least in later versions of Unity).

2. HUD (Heads Up Display) — by just tapping Alt and typing, you could quickly select an option from almost any application's menu (saving you the time of looking through the menus and trying to remember whether the desired option was under Edit or View).

3. Not a speed benefit, but: better use of vertical space.

BTW I think that XFCE is a great DE.

Post reply on HN